We spend about third of our lives sleeping, All the researches done in the last decade show that its vital and important to our mental and physical health, thinking process, managing all the things we learned during the day and more. interfering with the sleeping process means a big blow to the quality of your life.
20%-30% of people will suffer from insomnia in some stage of their lives, and the same number will need the help of medicine to sleep properly.
About 5% of the population suffer from moving-leg syndrome while sleeping, more than 7% suffer from sleep apnea, and the number of people suffering from snoring is even higher.
Even though some say its useless to catch up on sleep and complete missing sleeping hours, researches proved that the body actually remembers the shortage. Missing hours of sleep not only cause tiredness in the next day, but high risks for high blood pressure, road accidents and even depression.
What can you do to help you fall asleep faster? Here are the 10 commandments for good sleep:
1. Shorten your time in bed
Be in bed only near sleeping time. If you cant fall asleep – Get out of bed, make yourself busy in a calm activity and only come back to bed when you are ready to sleep.
2. Darken your room
Long and steady sleep, for most of us, requires complete darkness. Be sure to close all of the windows and curtains.
3. Get rid of noise
A ticking clock and a working radio might make falling asleep harder to do. If you can’t overcome the noise from outside, use ear-plugs, close the windows and your bedroom.
4. Avoid exercise before bed
Physical workout raises the adrenaline levels and will make falling asleep a hard task.
5. Eat an early dinner
Give up on heavy meals before bed.
6. Avoid caffeine 4 hours before sleep
Coffee, tea, cola, chocolate and other products with caffeine will prevent you from going into deeper sleep.
7. Give up alcohol late at night
Drinking wine might make you drowsy, but the breakdown products of alcohol have stimulating effect.
8. Keep the same sleeping and waking up hours
Changing these times might disturb you from falling asleep. Many people who sleep in on saturday have trouble falling asleep at night and waking up on sunday.
9. Don’t sleep during the day
Sleeping at noon will postpone the time it takes to fall asleep, will make waking up in the morning much harder and make you feel tired all day long.
10. Be careful of sleeping aid
Most of them will make us depended on them after a long use and will prevent us from falling asleep without them.